Slimming through electronica

[jducoeur]

Every week, I go down to Outer Limits and pick up my latest shipment of comics. This week, though, had something new: a DVD-ROM collection of The Incredible Hulk. All of it, compressed onto one little disc. It's one of the early steps in The Great Comic Reduction Project.

Right now, my biggest (literally) problem is the comic book collection. It's not that I've ever really thought of myself as a "collector" -- for instance, I buy relatively few back issues. I just buy stuff when it comes out, and then hold onto it in case I want to reread it sometime. In the small scale, that's pretty minor. But when you read as many comics as I do, for thirty years (my first comics were the Flash and Legion of Super-Heroes, back in 1977), they tend to pile up. I counted it the other day: I have 97 longboxes of comics -- and that's not counting the full-size magazines and graphic novels. Even by my standards, that's rather nuts.

So a major project over the next two years (about which I will be talking occasionally) is Dealing With The Comics Problem. I'm not willing to just dump all of them: there really are *some* books that I am fairly likely to re-read at some point. But the majority of the collection really isn't such high priority. I'm formally trying to get rid of 75% of the comics on this pass, which should get things back to a manageable state. In the long run, the intent is to do additional passes every few years, to keep trimming things back to only the books I most care about.

That said, it's not easy to get rid of this stuff. As with the videotapes, much though I might repeat The New Official Waks Family Mantra ("I'm Not Their Archivist"), getting rid of Information is difficult. So having a little methadone for that info-addiction is sometimes useful. Which is where the new DVDs come in.

Marvel is, gradually, releasing a lot of their major titles on DVD. The Hulk isn't actually the first, and I intend to track the others down -- they came and went before it occurred to me how useful they were. Specifically, they provide a mental crutch to make it easier to dump most of the physical comics.

They're by no means perfect. In most cases, they're medium-resolution photographs of the actual comics, done into PDF: good enough to read on a screen, but I suspect you wouldn't want to print them. They're amusingly complete (ads for Sea Monkeys and all), but the sensation isn't the same as reading paper, and I suspect that, realistically, I won't do extensive reading in them. And of course, electronic formats are always subject to bit rot, so I'm under no illusion that this is a perfect solution, so I'll probably hold onto the issues that I *really* care about (mostly the best bits of the Peter David run).

But it's a useful crutch. It helps me convince myself that I really can get rid of nearly all of those issues, without regret, and that's a lot of volume saved: probably a couple hundred issues, replaced with a slim disc. Another dozen of those, for other major books, and that alone makes a good start on the reduction project. It's only a beginning (while Marvel and DC might conceivably do this for all of their really major books, that's still probably only a quarter of the total collection), but every little bit helps...

Comments

[vairavi.livejournal.com]

I believe I may be able to acquire the Spider-Man and Fantastic Four DVD collections for you, if you are interested.

Confirmed

[vairavi.livejournal.com]

Add X-Men and the Avengers to that list, too.

Re: Confirmed

[jducoeur]

Interesting. Where from? I'm interested, but there are some ethical lines that I'm pretty stringent about. (Eg, I don't do bootlegs...)

Re: Confirmed

[vairavi.livejournal.com]

Ah, I'm afraid I can't help you then. I'm not entirely certain of the source of my available copies.

Re: Confirmed

[jducoeur]

Okay, cool -- thanks anyway...

Re: Confirmed

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

The FF/Spiderman/etc. DVDs, similar format to the Hulk one, are available from Marvel. I'm sure Steve can order it for you if you ask.

(or, http://www.amazon.com/Years-Fantastic-Four-Marvel-Enterprises/dp/0976888602 and such.)

Re: Confirmed

[jducoeur]

Okay, cool. I figured that was likely, unless they were some sort of limited run. (And there wasn't obvious evidence of such.) I'll probably wait a couple of weeks until Steve's life settles down again, and then deal with it -- I'd rather give him the middleman fee than Amazon...

[dsrtao]

Make a copy of that disc and put it in your bank deposit box... better, keep the copy at home and the original in the box.

[jducoeur]

Possible, but perhaps missing the point. This is less about actually *needing* those issues, and more about breaking the addiction. The point isn't to make sure that I have a copy forever -- it's to make it easier to let go. I suspect that, having gotten rid of everything except the stuff I *really* care about -- well, I won't care about the rest so much. I mean, it's not as if the Hulk is, by and large, great art.

Besides (repeat after me) "I Am Not Their Archivist". I mean, all of this stuff is available online in bootleg form, and likely always will be. This is about paying a reasonable price (and I do think that $50 for an archive of hundreds of issues is reasonable) to assuage my conscience, as well as to make it easier to let go. If the DVD then degrades and I need to read key bits from the bootlegs, I can do so without crossing my own ethical lines. (There's a separate posting brewing, on the subject of shareware and ethics...)

[alexx-kay.livejournal.com]

This is about paying a reasonable price (and I do think that $50 for an archive of hundreds of issues is reasonable) to assuage my conscience, as well as to make it easier to let go. If the DVD then degrades and I need to read key bits from the bootlegs, I can do so without crossing my own ethical lines. (There's a separate posting brewing, on the subject of shareware and ethics...)

I'm curious to hear more about those ethical lines. I mean, you've already bought all those issues at retail, so why pay the extra $50?

[jducoeur]

Well, I haven't bought anywhere near all of them -- probably about a third of them. And the switch of media is a grey area ethically: not necessarily a violation, but one of those places where my ethical lines aren't *entirely* clear.

So overall, it falls into my basic shareware principle: I consider it a reasonable price for the software, and well within my means, so I would prefer to pay it. If they were charging $500, I simply wouldn't do so, but in this case I'm happier keeping strictly on the clear side of that ethical line. In general, I treat almost all software as shareware these days, but part of doing so means being strictly honest about paying for the stuff I do use, and generally erring on the side of generosity. (There's an LJ rant brewing on this subject, having just discovered that one of the most useful shareware projects I know died last year, partly because of lack of support...)

[querldox.livejournal.com]

Website for the company doing the DVDs is http://www.gitcorp.com/pilot.asp?pg=products

In their upcoming section, they list Captain America, Iron Man, Thor, and Daredevil as coming out by 2008, in addition to the already released Spidey, FF, Avengers, Ghost Rider, Hulk, and Ultimate X-Men.

As a side note, be sure to check the contents of a disk before disposing of its title. For example, I'm hearing that the Avengers disk does *not* include the Giant-Size Avengers issues of the mid-70s, which were very directly tied into the Avengers issue-by-issue continuity, as well as featuring significant events such as Vision's origin and marriage to Wanda.

[jducoeur]

Ah -- very useful pointers. Thanks!

Bit rot?

[ladymacgregor.livejournal.com]

Forgive my ignorance - DVDs degrade? I thought the point of them was they would live forever (as opposed to, say VCR tapes). Do CDs degrade also? And what if you keep them out of direct sunlight, etc., etc.?

Re: Bit rot?

[jducoeur]

My understanding is that DVDs and CDs do degrade gradually. Not sure of the exact details, but my impression is that they tend to degrade, eg, slower than VHS but faster than vinyl. I've heard that they have an expected lifespan of a few decades. You might want to talk to someone with more experience on that topic though.

But more importantly, *formats* degrade quite rapidly. Consider how difficult it is to find either the hardware or software to read a typical data file from 20 years ago. I've got a bunch of 1/4 tapes, recorded from Solaris scarcely 15 years ago, that I'm not sure I'll ever manage to recover in a cost-effective way.

So I have no particular confidence that a DVD-ROM, filled with PDFs, will be at all straightforward to use in 20 years. The comics are more straightforward, but far more of a storage problem in the meantime...